Patterns and discriminability in language analysis

Abstract

Recent developments in the Word and Pattern approach to complex morphology have argued that words and the patterned relations between words are primary objects of morphological analysis. The primacy of words has two part/whole dimensions: the nature of their internal structure and the nature of their external relations to one another. Words consist of constitutive parts and words themselves are parts of larger patterns of systemic relatedness. We argue that internal structure is essentially discriminative, rather than morphemic, i.e., what is crucial for morphological organization is the ability to discriminate (patterns of) words from one another and all types of internal distinctions suffice to facilitate the necessary discriminability to establish patterns of words. The value and the operation of a discriminative perspective on the internal structure of words is also evident in the analysis of an entirely different phenomenon. Greenberg's (1963) Universal 34 states that “No language has a trial number unless it has a dual. No language has a dual unless it has a plural.” We present an associative model of the acquisition of grammatical number based on the Rescorla-Wagner learning theory Rescorla & Wagner (1972) that predicts this generalization. Number as a real-world category is inherently structured: higher numerosity sets are mentioned less frequently than lower numerosity sets, and higher numerosity sets always contain lower numerosity sets. Using simulations, we demonstrate that these facts, along with general principles of probabilistic learning, lead to the emergence of Greenberg's Number Hierarchy. The value of a discriminative perspective for language analysis ( Ramscar & Yarlett 2007 , Ramscar et al. 2010 , 2013 ) becomes clear in both word-based morphology and its explanatory role addressing a typological conundrum.